Writing in the Nooks and Crannies of the Day or Night

Writing requires solitude so that the ghosts will come unencumbered.

I can write anywhere if I have solitude. If not, I’ll pop in my ear buds and sound out any noise with classical music. We live in a small apartment in New York City and I do not have a room of my own, so it is at my dining room table in the early mornings where I set up shop. On the weekends, I write in our house near the beach. Though I now have a quasi-room of my own with a desk and bookshelves (until my son comes to visit!), I still prefer the dining room table, which is in fact also a kitchen table because it is the only table where we eat. One of my favorite poems by Joy Harjo is called “Perhaps the World Ends Here” and the first line is “The world begins at the kitchen table.” I think of this poem sometimes when I write, because a poem, a story, a novel will most likely begin at my kitchen table—and of course metaphorically, the table represents where life gathers. What’s paramount, for me, is not so much where I write, but how I write and what is required of me to write.

Since I’ve always had a full-time job—even in college and grad school I worked several part-time jobs—I squirrel away time for writing in-between. Early mornings, before I check into email and begin my day job, is the best time for me to write, when my mind is still half in dream. When I’m working on a long project, I am also writing when I’m taking walks, on the bus, or even on the Elliptical machine, where suddenly something comes to me and I whip up a few sentences on my phone to be later plugged into my document. Writing, for me, is a subversive act: While writing is my central drive, I prefer keeping it a secret. The more secretive, the more I’m able to risk.

How can one write, and have writing be one’s principal drive, when one has a full-time job? Once a project presents itself, it becomes an urgent matter. Writing happens in the early hours of the morning—or for others late at night. One writer I know is nocturnal: She sleeps in the day and writes all night. Writing can happen in the long days of a Saturday or Sunday, or a week holed up in a hotel or a writing retreat. The project or process continues even when one is not actually putting pen to paper. Many problems are figured out while gardening, swimming, taking the dog for a walk, sleeping. I need the pressure of no time to write because I want what I write to be dangerous and risky. If I have too much time, the pressure, the desire, the urgency dissipates.

Writing, for me, is a subversive act.

In Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa believes that the writer “doesn’t choose his themes; he is chosen by them.” The choice of theme is “perhaps nonexistent . . . My impression is that life, a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to share himself free by turning them into stories.”

So how does this pertain to the secret act of writing? To shake free and turn obsession into stories, one needs privacy of the mind. What the mind divulges when pen is taken to paper, or fingers to keyboard, is often unknowable to the writer unless she gives herself to the urgency. Writing unfolds in a narrative compelled by the writer’s consciousness, and, through the act of writing dredges up the unconscious, memories, desires, dreams. (If you don’t show up, you don’t know what you’ll miss.) If the writer is afraid of what she might reveal, she self-censors. Hence, why it must be kept as a secret, as if what I’m writing will never be revealed.

I imagine my reader as a clandestine friend who is receiving access to a secret portal—what my imagination has created out of secrecy, urgency, risk, and permission. Fiction is, as Llosa argues, “a lie covering up a deep truth; it is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t thus have to invent it. It isn’t the face of History but rather her reverse or flip side: what didn’t happen and therefore had to be fabricated in the imagination and in words to fulfill the ambitions real life was unable to satisfy, to fill the voids women and men discovered around them and tried to populate with ghosts they conjured up for themselves.”

I love this definition of fiction. It gives heft to the power of the imagination in tandem with the conscious or unconscious drive that is best accessed in privacy, in secrecy. Writing requires solitude so that the ghosts will come unencumbered. (I’ve known writers to give up their writing practice because they fear being alone.) Llosa also argues that “authenticity or sincerity for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.”

To accept one’s demons is dangerous, and for some of us, can only be accessed in small doses, in secrecy, in the subversive act. Sometimes what I’m writing is so hot, I must step away from it, clean out a closet or wash my floor. To tap into these demons makes the story compelling, urgent, even sometimes unthinkable! I treasure where and when I write, even in the nooks and crannies of the day or night, because writing gives my life meaning and pleasure. Sometimes I am astonished by the leaps of my imagination once a story has run out of the gate like a horse suddenly set free. It is the act itself, no matter where it takes place, that is the reward.